Betty Mae Tiger Jumper: The Nurse Who Started a Newspaper and Led the Seminole Tribe

At fourteen, Betty Mae Tiger left Florida because no school in it would take her. In a segregated state, neither the white schools nor the Black schools enrolled Seminole children. So she went to a federal Indian boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina, and became the first Florida Seminole to learn to read and write English.

The First of Many Firsts

She was born in a Seminole camp near Indiantown on April 27, 1923, to Ada Tiger of the Snake clan. Her father was a French trapper, and because of that some tribal medicine men threatened her life when she was five. Her great-uncle intervened, and her mother moved the family to the Dania reservation in Broward County.

She graduated from high school in 1945, then completed a nursing program at the Kiowa Indian Hospital in Oklahoma. She came home and spent forty years as a traveling nurse across the Big Cypress, Brighton and Hollywood reservations, translating for Seminole patients and building a health care system where none had existed.

Chief, Editor, Trailblazer

In 1956 she co-founded the tribe’s first newspaper, the Seminole News. It grew into The Seminole Tribune, which she edited for years, and in 1989 the Tribune became the first Native American newspaper to win a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

In 1967 she was elected chairwoman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the first woman to hold the office. She served until 1971, and she founded the United South and Eastern Tribes, which became one of the most influential Indigenous organizations in the country.

Where to Learn More

The Betty Mae Jumper Medical Center on the Hollywood Reservation carries her name, and a historical marker stands near the Seminole Inn in Indiantown, about seven miles from where she was born. Her 2001 memoir, A Seminole Legend, written with the historian Patsy West, tells the whole story. She was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994 and received an honorary doctorate from Florida State University. She died on January 14, 2011.